The government has portrayed the jumble of propane gas cylinders, gas cans, wiring, batteries and fireworks found in a car parked in Times Square yesterday as a terrorist bomb.

DHS boss Napolitano took to the Sunday talk shows this morning and characterized the “amateurish type of bomb” as “a potential terrorist attack.” She told NBC’s David Gregory that it was “too soon to tell… who or what groups were responsible.”

New York’s bomb squad said the mishmash of fireworks and wires was not even a bomb. Kevin Barry, a former supervisor in the New York City police bomb squad, speculated that if it had functioned “it would be more of an incendiary event” than an explosion.

Fox News conjured up Dhiran Barot to make the point that the smoking jumble of junk found in Times Square might be related to homegrown terror. “The attempted attack has echoes in the plots drawn up by convicted UK terrorist Dhiran Barot,” speculates Fox. “His ‘Gas Limos’ plot, though never executed, included using gas-laden cars targeting, among other places, sites in New York City.”

Barot’s fantasy included a dirty bomb and a gas attack on the Heathrow Express train service, the detonation of a bomb under the River Thames to flood the Tube network, bombing the Savoy hotel in London and mainline train stations, bombing the IMF and World Bank in Washington, bombing the New York Stock Exchange building and the Citigroup headquarters, as well as the Prudential building in Newark, New Jersey.

Mr. Barot’s only crime was that he lived in a violent fantasy world. He had no connections to al-Qaeda, no money for his supposed bomb plot, and no bomb. The case against him was predicated on a few scribblings in a notebook. “Barot is not a terrorist, he is not involved with Al Qaeda, he is a lone nut who day dreamed of being in a Bruce Willis film,” Steve Watson wrote on November 9, 2006.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“The Times Square car bomb in New York bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack on central London three years ago,” opines The Daily Telegraph this morning. “Intelligence agencies believe that Bilal Abdulla, one of the men behind the British attack, had met senior leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

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As it turns out, British cops and MI5 knew about Abdulla. “British-born NHS doctor Bilal Abdulla launched car bomb attacks on London and Glasgow despite having been identified as a terror suspect by MI5,” the London Telegraph reported in December, 2008.

As should be expected, the usual suspects have emerged from the woodwork to characterize this non-bomb event as serious terrorism.

Crackpot “terrorism expert” Walid Phares of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (a neocon organization linked to the CIA proxy National Endowment for Democracy) told Fox News the non-bombing event in Times Square is linked to terrorism. “It was indeed an ‘act of terror.’ Now comes the next part. We’ll need to know more about the minds behind it Saturday night’s fatal plan. Was it designed by a domestic extremist(s), homegrown jihadist(s) or was internationally coordinated? These are the questions as we search for answers in the days ahead.”

New York officials, however, are not characterizing the event as a botched act of terrorism. “Officials said it was not considered to be a terrorist threat, and New York City police reportedly asked federal authorities to stand down,” reports Earth Times.

The feds and the neocons, however, are not likely to stand down, not when there is yet another excuse to continue the bogus global war on manufactured terrorism.